Cloudflare forces consumers onto higher tiers with threats of shutdowns

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Editor's note:

This article will cover Cloudflare's unsavory behavior when it comes to upselling their enterprise plans. Despite of what the customer may think, the decision is not optional; rejecting their offers one to many times may encourage Cloudflare to shutdown your site along with disabling your account until you agree to the "deal" that was offered.

Background

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Cloudflare is a(n) American based Content Delivery Network (CDN) that focuses on serving content for the world wide web, has taken part in unethical upselling behaviors for their hosting services. Such examples include:

• Users being pitched aggressively to enterprise despite the lack of clear agreement and what would improve
• Users denying the upgrade and then shortly after have sites removed and their account restricted
• Lack of basic business courtesy forcing the customer to bounce around multiple teams (from weeks to months) to resolve a dispute or force bad press for a response
• Shutting down your account and purging your sites if they catch wind on the customers plan on moving to a competitor
• "Imaginative Pricing" telling users the plan they need to use based on how much there willing to spend

Threatening and harming consumers

Across many incidents involving Cloudflare, their marketing department often will extort their users into paying an excessive amount of cash towards their services without a trustworthy reason given.

In early 2024, Cloudflare threatened one such consumer's company to pay $120k up front for an Enterprise plan that the business had no desire to pay for. The decisions pulled by Cloudflare within this entire incident was not handled by a department such as billing or trust and safety, but rather marketing. During the incident, Cloudflare caused considerable unrest and when the business suggested moving to a competitor, they decided to maliciously purge all infrastructure for their web services, including DNS records, email infrastructure, and even the website itself.

Cloudflare's response

In a now deleted comment from a Cloudflare employee preserved by another user, they insulted the user reporting on their incident. Claims included TOS breaches and more, despite a lack of communication beyond their marketing department.

Consumer response

These threats have scared consumers into leaving Cloudflare, as the web infrastructure they set up has either been damaged by Cloudflare's actions, or are too wary by these actions to desire further using Cloudflare.